In preparation for recording my arrangements of music by Yes for solo electric bass, I've started taking music lessons with Mark Stefaniw, a fine bassist in the Denver area. Under Mark's tutelage I've been digging into music theory, which is both fascinating and enlightening (especially given my many years of musical learning at the surface).
Mark likes to explain scales and modes in terms of tetrachords: a sequence of four notes, each of which is separated from its neighbor by a whole step or a half step. In turn, any given mode consists of two tetrachords (i.e., a set of four notes followed by a second set of four notes). For instance, a C major scale consists of C-D-E-F (with steps of whole, whole, and half) and G-A-B-C (again with steps of whole, whole, and half). Furthermore, there's also a step (either whole or half) between the first tetrachord and the second tetrachord (in the case of C major, it's a whole step between F and G).
In constructing the traditional modes of Western music, there are four possible tetrachords (I'm making up the notation here, using numbers for the notes in the sequence and "w" or "h" for a whole step or half step from one note to the next):
Now, here's where things get interesting. The traditional modes are constructed as shown below (confusingly, some of the modes have the same names as the tetrachords, so I use lowercase for tetrachords and uppercase for modes), where the root or tonic notes of mode examples are formed from the steps of the C major scale:
After the Phrygian mode, the modes cycle through the tetrachords in the same order as the modes, but starting at the lydian tetrachord (not the ionian). Therefore at some level all you really need to remember is i-d-p-l (ionian-dorian-phrygian-lydian) as the tetrachord building blocks for the modes.
My favorite exercise right now is working my way through the modes (and up the neck of the bass) by playing all the notes of the C-major scale but progressively increasing the tonic as hinted above:
These aren't just theoretical games. One practical application is my arrangement of the Yes song "A Venture" (from The Yes Album). Although the song is in the key of G minor (the relative minor of B♭ major), I discern three distinct sections: D Phrygian for the bass-heavy introduction, A Dorian for the first part of each verse, and G Aeolian for the second part of each verse. Almost all of the notes are in the key of G minor, but changing the tonal center from D to A to G gives each section quite a different sound. I didn't understand the theory behind all this when I arranged the song for solo electric bass a few years ago, but understanding it now gives me a greater appreciation for what Yes did in the compositional process and enables me to highlight certain notes as a way of emphasizing the modes for each section.
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Geoff Huston's keynote talk at RIPE 75, "The Death of Transit and Beyond", provides a sobering perspective on the recent evolution of the Internet - and, because so many of our personal, economic, intellectual, and political interactions happen over the Internet these days, on the evolution of society at large. Although Geoff tried to steer clear of alarmism, the picture is not pretty. Extreme concentration of wealth and power has led to a few leviathans controlling an overwhelming percentage of our online life (as of today, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Alibaba, Tencent, and Facebook are seven of the eight largest public corporations in the world by market capitalization). Furthermore, as I explained in my talk "The Internet is Dead, Long Live the Internet" three years ago, in large measure these companies make money by tracking everything we do online and then selling those profiles to advertisers and marketers. And it gets worse: unlike the so-called robber barons of the late 19th century Gilded Age, which merely controlled markets for transportation, steel, oil, coal, and other physical goods, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways today's robber barons monitor and increasingly direct our mental and emotional life through the news we learn about, the books we read, the videos we watch, the people we talk with and connect to, and much more.
With a combined value approaching four trillion dollars (that's $4,000,000,000,000), there's not much that these companies can't buy. And, as Geoff points out in his talk, what they are really buying is the future - not just their future as organizations (major companies of the first Gilded Age are still with us, after all), but the future of humanity, too. Through the Internet of Things, wearables, augmented reality, virtual reality, and other technologies that most people haven't even heard of yet, these behemoths are working to insinuate themselves into every aspect of human life: our work, our homes, our cars, our communications, our clothes, our health, our bodies, our minds. More and more aspects of life (say, your interaction with your doctor) will be guided by software workflows that programmers believe are best, and eventually by machine-learning algorithms that even the programmers don't completely understand.
We are, quite literally, ceding our humanity.
Last week, I had a chat with someone from Taiwan whose mother writes Chinese characters with gorgeous, flowing calligraphy. Yet the input editor on her computer often doesn't recognize the characters she writes, whereas her son (who knows that the computer is looking for sharper edges and blockier shapes) experiences greater success. Similarly, voice-activated computers expect people to speak in certain ways, wearables might expect people to move in certain ways, driver-assist vehicles might expect people to drive in certain ways, refrigerators might expect people to eat in certain ways, home-automation systems might expect people to live in certain ways, etc. The aesthetic, the beautiful, the individual, or the just plain human will increasingly be sacrificed to meeting the expectations and limitations of the computers - and, especially, computers controlled by gargantuan, faceless, heartless organizations for which you are merely a means to their ends. And, because everything you do will be monitored and tracked, if you want to experience convenience, save money on home or auto or health insurance, receive certain kinds of medical care, or whatever, you will need to conform.
I don't like to sound so pessimistic, but things really do seem bleak.
What can one do? In the grand scheme of a planetary Internet, not much, I suppose. However, these modern-day robber barons succeed only because of the choices made by billions of individuals. For myself, I don't have a Facebook account, I don't use Google if I can help it (I prefer Fastmail for email and DuckDuckGo for search), I block ad trackers in my browser (Firefox has good configuration options here), I try to avoid ordering goods from Amazon, I read physical books instead of ebooks, and so forth. However, there is more that I could do (I publish my own books using an Amazon service even though I also make them available for free on my website, I switch back and forth between an Apple computer and a Linux machine, etc. - as I am wont to say, there's no monopoly on hypocrisy). Yet perhaps if enough people change their habits it will put a dent in current trends; at the least, if you make better choices then you will live a bit more freely.
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I've long imagined that the sixth movement in my "eudaimonia suite" of books on the art of living would be about Taoism. However, recently an intriguing ambition came to me: writing a novel about Pyrrho's journey to Central Asia and Northwestern India with Alexander the Great's army and his conversion to skepticism there by early Buddhists (likely in the Gandharan city of Taxila above the Peshawar Valley - a great center of learning at the time). I like the goal of exploring the commonalities among early Taoism, early Buddhism, and Pyrrhonism, as well as Heraclitus and other pre-Socractic philosophers. In essence, this would be a novelization of Christopher Beckwith's thesis from his fascinating book Greek Buddha. Aside from the usual challenges of working through the ideas of a thinker like Nietzsche or Thoreau, there would be new obstacles to overcome here: I don't know Sanskrit or classical Chinese, and I've never written any fiction, not even a short story. Truth be told, I'm not deeply drawn to stories and I rarely read novels. However, a few years ago I read both The Glass Bead Game and Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, and recently I read When Nietzsche Wept by Irvin Yalom. In so doing, I realized that I enjoy novels of ideas, which have no plot to speak of but make up for it with interesting dialogue and internal discovery. In any case, after I publish Songs of Zarathustra a few weeks from now I'll first finish my translation of the ethical writings of Epicurus and then write an epitome of Aristotle's moral philosophy, so writing a book on ancient Buddhism and skepticism is years away.
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In early August I started an experiment to once again offer accounts at the Jabber.org messaging service, where we had turned off account creation several years ago. Given that today is my "Jabiversary" (it was 18 years ago that I first posted to the JDEV discussion list!), I figured I'd end the experiment today and report on the results. My two goals with the experiment were (1) to see if people still want Jabber.org accounts and (2) to informally poll people about donating money to help us run the service, which has been absolutely free since 1999 (e.g., we might use funds to purchase new equipment or pay for individuals to fix bugs, create new features, maintain our infrastructure, offer customer support, etc.). On both counts I would say the experiment was a qualified success: I received over 1000 account requests in 4 months and at least 30% of respondents said they would be happy to donate (some even sent me cash in the mail or payments via PayPal). Based on these results, I am encouraged to move forward with opening up automated account creation again (probably in early 2018) and with establishing a formal organization (e.g., a non-profit or cooperative) to run the service so that we can open a bank account and accept donations. Stay tuned for more details on both fronts! (Oh, and if you really really need an account between now and early 2018, I can still create one for you manually.)
I'm overjoyed to announce that I'm joining Mozilla, makers of the Firefox web browser. I've been using Mozilla software since Milestone 8 of the original browser release in July of 1999, so this feels like coming home. More important, Mozilla's mission of defending the open web is completely consistent with my own commitment to open source and open standards (as demonstrated through my work on Jabber/XMPP and IETF standards for the past 18 years). I have deep respect for what the Mozilla team has accomplished, both architecturally and organizationally, and I'm extremely excited about helping to make Mozilla an even stronger force for good in the world!
About eight months ago, even before I published The Upland Farm as the fourth volume in my series on the art of living, I started to read Nietzsche's books for a third time, writing poems for Songs of Zarathustra as I worked my way chronologically from The Birth of Tragedy through Ecce Homo. Last weekend, I completed work on the first draft of this poetry cycle on Nietzsche's philosophy of life, which I plan to publish in early 2018. Before then, I'll read his letters and notebooks (including the ever-controversial collection called "The Will to Power") as well as some of the vast literature on Nietzsche's life and thought, such as:
I'll post again when Songs of Zarathustra is done and published!
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